1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to rapidly provisioning resources geospatially for responding to emergencies and more particularly to managing and geospatially provisioning cloud computing resources for responding rapidly to emergencies that may spread beyond its initial location.
2. Background Description
Flooding, bush fires, twisters, earth quakes and other emergency situations require quick reactions based on little or no or even conflicting information. Typical state of the art emergency response systems notify people about local emergency situations, e.g., broadcasting messages to mobile devices in the local geographical region. In addition to notifying mobile device owners, however, responding to any emergency may also require immediate and unconstrained access to computing resources and services to handle the unexpected. Unfortunately, even when such information is available, accessing it still may be limited and/or resources may be constrained. This can and does limit responders' ability to respond to the emergency.
During a regional emergency, when an emergency spreads beyond its initial locale, for example, dealing with the emergency may require a comprehensive response. An effective comprehensive response requires an optimized solution with improved logistics and that leverages computer simulations for response planning and to avoid exacerbating and/or spreading the effects of the emergency. Response planning may rely on simulating transport, emergency impact, food supply, and so forth in real time, to understand different emergency scenarios. The simulations may serve to anticipate issues that might arise in face of an emergency, to help prevent further losses, and to begin reconstruction immediately after the emergency subsides. Web-site response times that are necessary for emergency services typically place demands on computer resources and network bandwidth. Consequently, primary emergency response goals are insuring adequate computer resource availability, insuring responsiveness for providing affected users, companies, and government agencies with services, and enabling them to prepare and respond to the emergencies.
There have been two main approaches to provisioning computer resources and services for and in emergencies, i.e., reservation and on-demand provisioning. Reserving resources required maintaining sufficient resources to cover all reservations to make resources available when and as needed. Unfortunately, this required maintaining excess resources, resources in addition to whatever is currently in use to cover all emergency scenarios at once just to guarantee full coverage. Consumers pay in advance to reserve resources to meet expectations, even though the reserved resources may sit fallow, unused in whole or part for long periods of time. Thus, reserving resources has not proven cost-effective
In making resources available on-demand, resource allocation is performed when the resources are needed, e.g., when the emergency situation spreads to the particular locale. However, accessing a distributed and shared computing environment, such as a data center or a cloud infra-structure, requires a setup time. Setup typically requires reorganizing current workloads, configuring resources for new workload, and transferring necessary emergency data for processing. The setup time may add a significant delay at a critical time and allow the emergency to result in more damage than might otherwise be unnecessary.
Thus, there is a need for quickly making computing resources available to emergency responders and more particularly in efficiently and reliably making adequate computing resources quickly available to responders during emergencies.